Breaking News: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit

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We just received confirmation that Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Boston-based Reddit earlier this morning, and will make the announcement later today. The price is not being disclosed.

All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital. Reddit, founded and funded in 2005, is a YCombinator company (see our interview with YCombinator founder Paul Graham here). The two original founders are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and they were later joined by Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz.

Reddit is a social news site that has always played second fiddle to Digg, although Reddit does have an active and loyal userbase. Users praise Reddit for having a very quick load time and no advertising. Like Digg, news stories on Reddit are submitted by users, and other users vote up or down on the story. When it gets enought “up” votes, the story appears on the home page.

Wired will leave Reddit as a standalone site, and also integrate it into Condé Nast web properties.

See our earlier coverage on recent Digg acquisition rumors.
Update: Marshall and I just recorded a podcast with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and it will be up on TalkCrunch shortly. We couldn’t get them to tell us the acquisition price, but they did tell us that the company has raised just $100k (all in summer 2005) and currently has an average of 70,000 daily unique visitors and 700,000 or so page views.